John Powys - The Brazen Head

“O you must come, you must, you must, you must, all of you, now at once, now that you are here!” he murmured, as he and his shadow — for the sun seemed to be playing a private game with the two of them — danced their special man-and-his-shadow dance. And the wind too had a share in it; for the thin straight dusky hair of the Baron of Lost Towers was lifted up and down on his head as if by the puffs of a petulant rival of that obsequious shadow.

Probably owing to some instinctive gust of fellow-feeling for a being as much devoid of man’s moral sense as he was devoid of man’s self-righteous attitude towards his exploitation of animals, both horses now made an emphatic movement to follow him.

“Well, Basileus,” muttered Baron Boncor, “it evidently looks as if we men must obey the oracles of creatures who probably know the will of heaven better than we do! So come along my Christian friends! Let two legs follow four legs and all our eyes see what happens!”

It cannot be said that Bonaventura looked at Spardo or that Spardo nodded a reply to Bonaventura’s look. It might rather be said that the man on the back of Cheiron and the man at the side of Cheiron followed Baron Maldung as unquestioningly as if they were members of the Household of Lost Towers.

As for Baron Boncor of Cone, he brought up the rear upon Basileus with an expression on his good-natured bearded face which seemed to say: “Well! as long as I’ve got your crazy backs in front of me , I’m ready for anything! From behind I can see how things go. Chance often gives a chance to those who don’t mind bringing up the rear; and, if it doesn’t in this case, so be it.”

It was rather a startling surprise to both Spardo and Bonaventura when they found themselves completely clear of the forest, and saw in front of them, a vast reedy swamp that extended to the horizon in every direction, save the one from which they had come to the really terrifying bulk of Lost Towers.

Lost Towers looked at first sight like a ruin built entirely of black marble; but on nearer approach it showed itself to be anything but a ruin; for the vast blocks of black stone of which it was built had something Egyptian and pyramidal in their size, and although divided and broken up into many small domes and minarets and watch-towers, the general effect made a tremendous awe-inspiring impression upon everyone who had never seen it before. There was something staggering — in truth you might say almost shocking — about its antiquity. It looked as if it had been built of materials brought on barges through a network of canals from the sea-coast, a coast which had been reached by ship from Atlantis itself in pre-historic times. A very queer effect was produced upon a traveller’s nerves the moment he set eyes upon it, a disturbing, troubling, and bewildering effect. The first sight of it must have always touched some long-buried race-nerve in us all that goes back to antediluvian times.

It was certainly as queer a cortège as had ever reached that weird mass of domes and towers in all its incredibly long history, this little group that now approached its portentous entrance. By reason of its own Baron being the leader of this queer band, they were received in a manner bordering upon a religious ceremony.

Lady Lilt herself came out to meet them, dressed so extravagantly that Baron Boncor assured his grey horse that the lady must have been waiting for their arrival in a wardrobe-chamber looking out their way. The retainers who assembled on the small square of cut grass in front of the high, narrow, strangely painted gates, gates that never, by night or day, seemed entirely shut or entirely open, must have amounted to a dozen men and a dozen women, all dressed so much alike and all so mingled together that it was hard to distinguish men-servants from maid-servants as they surrounded the visitors.

But the apparel they all wore was so remarkable in its colour that only a very discerning eye would have been likely to detect that the materials, whereof these richly-coloured garments were made, were a sorry draggled-tailed patch-work of odds and ends, stitched together anyhow, a motley agglomeration of woven stuffs that had only two purposes; the first, to cover — you couldn’t say to warm — human bodies, and, the second, to receive the particular red-brown dye which had been the prerogative of a special family from somewhere in the far north, who, for several generations, had lived in Lost Towers, to prepare, to make, to mix, to adapt to every kind of weather, and to apply to every sort of fabric. This colour had exactly, precisely, and to the last nicety, the shade of the ground at the roots of the forest pines, and also of the narrow foot-wide paths that horsemen, and very often their dogs too, had to follow, as they made their way through the woods.

Baron Maldung himself resembled a middle-aged acrobat with a profile so startlingly like that of certain busts of the Emperor Nero that visitors to Lost Towers who had pilgrimaged to Rome wondered sometimes, especially when they observed the dictatorial manner of the Baron and the something like obsequiousness with which everyone treated him, whether he might not really be, as the man himself always maintained he was, descended from ancestors who had not come from the North at all, but from Rome itself.

There was a tall black poplar on one side of this stretch of grass, now crowded with retainers in the Lost Towers red-brown attire; and though there were few leaf-buds on it at this early season the great tree had a happy and vital look, as if its sap was already stirring. Not far from this benevolent forest-giant there grew a small thorn, and it happened that Bonaventura, whose hold on Chieron’s reins was entirely negligible, now that he had so much to see and so much more to think about, allowed the horse to press so closely against this leafless bush that a perceptible tuft of the creature’s skin with a patch of his fur was torn away by the bush’s powerful thorns.

In a flash Baron Maldung observed this misadventure and quick as lightning leapt upon the offending thorn-bush and began hacking at it with a short sharp little war-axe which he unhooked from his belt. Lady Lilt, who had been tenderly stroking the deformity on the neck of Chieron, a deformity that to the eyes of Spardo seemed growing larger and more like a human head with every touch the lady gave it, now sprang to the side of her lord, and first with one bare arm and then with the other, though both arms were soon bleeding as the thorn-bush defended itself, held up the thing’s branches towards the slashing fury of Maldung’s war-axe.

The small bush was soon level with the ground; but the insanity of life-hatred in Maldung seemed to increase moment by moment with each advance in the demolition of those crumpled, twisted, wrinkled, broken little twigs, and, as can be imagined, each little drop of perspiration from the white arms that were acting like assistant executioners added to the man’s frenzy.

And it was at this moment, just when the now quite horizontal stream of afternoon sunlight had turned that small square of green grass into a radiant dance-lawn, that Spardo noticed that on the very edge of the reedy swamp there grew an immensely old oak-tree by the side of a small mound, and that upon this mound a very white full-grown lamb was bleating piteously. But all eyes, including Spardo’s, were now concentrated upon the exquisitely lovely and magnetically provocative daughter of the house, who now came forth to play her part in her parents’ battle with this sub-demonic vegetation.

Her part just now seemed to be the pretence that she had rushed forth from the hands of her tirewomen, in such haste to join the fight against these appalling monsters who had invaded this innocent world of noble animals, that she had been too hurried to remember to put all her clothes on. Her haste was, however, as even Spardo could see, attended by an exquisite delicacy of choice as to just where the effect of not being fully dressed would be maddeningly tantalizing, and indeed, not only seductive, but what you might call ravishing.